


Traipse

by sweetest (hoesthetic)



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Bad Homelives, Bittersweet, Inappropriate Humor, Kinda, M/M, Neurodiversity, Polyamory, Underage Drinking, Underage Smoking, as in morbid & probably problematic humour
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-20
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-30 03:36:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15743430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hoesthetic/pseuds/sweetest
Summary: Hyunjin and Felix aren’t dating, if you ask him. If you ask it from Changbin, he’ll probably say that they are. What the reason for that is, Hyunjin hasn’t quite figured it out.





	Traipse

**Author's Note:**

> this isnt a very happy or cute fic. serious issues arent taken seriously in this but its a form of coping for the characters!!

 

"You aren’t allowed to smoke here you know. The fire alarms could go off.”

He recognizes Felix’s voice without turning around so he doesn’t bother to move, leaning against the opened window of the classroom he’s in. Hyunjin considers dropping the cigarette over the edge just to annoy Felix by lifting up his hands, free of anything, and saying that he wasn’t smoking despite the obvious smell of bitter smoke. But it’d be a waste and he doesn’t like to be wasteful.

“What about it?” He asks instead. The weather is light grey and it looks like it could rain. Felix walks beside him, nudging Hyunjin to step aside so he’ll fit in front of the window too, to stare out to the chilly afternoon air.

“Just thought I’d remind you,” Felix says. Hyunjin glances at him with a side eye. His face looks blank, blank meaning something like disappointment, or maybe that’s a wrong word for it. He doesn’t look happy, but Hyunjin never expected him to.

”Thanks man,” he says, bringing the half finished cigarette to his lips and taking a drag. Despite what Felix might say, Hyunjin knows he likes the smell of smoke. He also knows Felix doesn’t like the grimy scent on his clothes caused by it but Hyunjin carries around his cologne. Changbin thinks that smells too strong. So, no matter what he does he can’t please everyone, barely even two people.

Hyunjin leans closer and pecks Felix’s cheek as a thank you of some sort. Felix doesn’t even look at him.

”Do you think it’s gonna rain?” Hyunjin asks.

”Yeah, probably.”

He sighs, flicking his thumb for the excess ash to fall off.

”Gotta stick around for longer then,” Hyunjin mumbles, mostly to himself. Felix puts his palm on the small of his back and even if he isn’t really sure, he thinks it’s some awkward gesture of comfort. Wordless, low maintenance.

“Till a teacher finds you?”

“I mean, hopefully not. They don’t exactly like this,” Hyunjin shrugs his shoulders. This meaning him hanging around the school campus afterhours, for that he doesn’t want to go home and places like libraries are only entertaining for some time. Felix knows this like he knew that Hyunjin would be in the classroom, it’s very clear that he does. He isn’t exactly sure how he feels about it. There’s something inherently vulnerable about it, Hyunjin doesn’t like vulnerable. But he likes Felix.

“Do you wanna come over?”

“Your mom doesn’t like me. Thinks I’m bad influence or whatever. As if you aren’t as rotten yourself.”

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her,” Felix cracks a lazy smile. Hyunjin doesn’t answer for a second, settling for a long drag from his cigarette. It probably looks like he is in thought but he isn’t. He has decided the answer already.

“Fine then,” Hyunjin nods. He looks down at the fall from the window, the meters between him and the concrete.

“Let’s go,” Felix moves the hand from the small of his back to around his shoulders as he speaks. Hyunjin shakes his head before lifting his arm, gesturing his cigarette.

“I’ll finish this first,” he mumbles. He brings it to Felix’s lips, who with clear hesitation, takes a small drag. He doesn’t inhale it to his lungs, just holds it in cheeks for a second before blowing it out. Hyunjin doesn’t call him out on it.

He tries to be quick, taking errantic drags with not much time in between them. It’s not the most pleasant way but he doesn’t want to waste it, still. In the end, Hyunjin puts it out on the metal windowsill and drops it over the edge. He watches as it falls before he can’t tell it apart from the shapes of stones and flat chewing gum.

“‘Kay, let’s get going.”

  
  
  


Hyunjin and Felix aren’t dating, if you ask him. If you ask it from Changbin, he’ll probably say that they are. What the reason for that is, Hyunjin hasn’t quite figured it out.

He loves the both of them, he thinks. In some unconventional, messed up way. Hyunjin loves them more than he loves his family. He loves them more than anyone else. It feels simple so he doesn’t want to complicate it by giving it labels.

If you ask him what the three of them are, Hyunjin will say friends. They are friends despite everything.

Hyunjin is laying on Felix’s bed, a bedcover separating his dirty clothes and the sheets, while the doorbell rings and Felix rushes to open it. According to his words his parents shouldn’t be back yet but Hyunjin is apathetic to it no matter what.

“Look who showed up,” Felix’s voice carries through the halls and walls of his apartment.

“I can’t fucking see anyone, who is it?” He calls back, not bothering to get up.

“Fuck you, Hyunjin,” Changbin’s amused voice rings in his ears. A smile rises to his lips.

“Sweet,” he says loud enough for them to hear. It’s not necessary after a moment when they return to Felix’s room.

”Where the fuck have you been?” Hyunjin directs his question at Changbin, sitting up in the bed. Felix sits down on the edge of it, back pressing against Hyunjin’s legs.

”Busy,” Changbin says vaguely, pulling out the chair by the desk.

”That isn’t a place,” Felix comments.

“I’ve been home. Doing things. Why do you care?”

Hyunjin purses his lips but doesn’t answer his question. Changbin hasn’t showed up to school for four days straight now, barely answering to their texts either.

“Maybe we don’t,” Hyunjn says then.

“Sexy. Just what I wanted to hear,” Changbin picks up something from Felix’s desk and throws it at Hyunjin, who blocks it with his arms. It’s some sort of a pencil case.

“Will you come to school tomorrow?” Felix asks, leaning back with Hyunjin’s legs still beneath his back. Changbin shrugs his shoulders before lifting his hand to ruffle his black hair.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“Can you answer properly even once?” Hyunjin asks. Changbin raises his brows.

“Who knows.”

Felix snorts at this. Hyunjin gives him an unimpressed look before falling back on the bed, laying more comfortably.

“I will kill you,” he says, looking up at the roof. Changbin laughs, Felix pokes him in the knee.

“Oh shit, thank you.”

“Hyunjin, go see a therapist, please. No harming him.”

“That shit is expensive. Not to mention boring.”

“Listen to him. Killing me is free, no therapists for him, Felix.”

“God, I love you,” Hyunjin grins at Changbin, extending his hand for some sort of a high five.

  
  
  


Hyunjin once saw them kiss underneath the yellow lamppost light.

Feelings are complicated, weird things. Sticky and slimy, sweet and nice, warm and cold in the same time. It was the spring before Hyunjin’s 17th summer. Now that it’s autumn it feels like a distant memory. It is, sort of.

It was night, of course it was. Two boys wouldn't dare to kiss in the daylight, not boys like them, at least. It’s how Hyunjin sees it. Felix was dressed in a red Adidas jacket, Changbin had rips in all of his clothes. Both of them looked pretty and yellow, but that was because of the flickering light. Hyunjin was freezing cold in a t-shirt, arms bare in weather still too chilly for it, a grocery store plastic bag in his hand. A shopping list of milk, pasta, something sweet, sun-dried tomatoes, in his phone’s notes.

Hyunjin didn’t stare but he didn’t look away either.

He didn’t show up for school the next day. But that was for another reason.

  
  
  


Hyunjin smokes because it’s easy but not because he’s dependant on it. Felix doesn’t go a week without skipping at least one day of school, and Hyunjin thinks it’s because his brain goes click and clack, and then his hands don’t stop shaking. Changbin is just Changbin and Hyunjin has seen him blackout drunk more times than he can count.

Changbin says that he has it under control but if Hyunjin says the same thing about his smoking habit, Felix and Changbin both look at him like he kicked a kitten. Or maybe that isn’t the look. They look at him like they don’t believe him. And hey, they probably don’t. But who the fuck does?

Hyunjin smokes because his parents do, because from the young age of eight years old he learned how the excess ash feels on his skin and before that he became numb to the smell. According to Changbin it smells like death in his house. Hyunjin can’t smell it but he believes him, for it looks like death as well. He hasn’t cleaned his room in ages and he probably won’t. What’s the point when he only sleeps there, trying to avoid spending time in the house as well as he can. People like him end up doing unrespectable things so why not start young. His habits are unnecessary, ordinary and stupid. Sounds a lot like him.

Hyunjin had taken the bottle of vodka from the kitchen cabinet. If his parents notice it missing and yell at him, he’ll yell back.

Felix looks dumb with his cheeks flushed with alcohol. He always gets super red, his whole face and ears, but mostly cheeks, in the firetruck red that looks like rash. The grin on his lips is bright and happy-looking so Hyunjin doesn’t care about the shade of his cheeks. They’re sitting on top of a slide in a playground, it’s a Saturday evening, the night is chilly and Hyunjin shivers in his windbreaker. But soon he won’t be able to feel it when he gets tipsy enough.

Changbin is on his right side, Felix on the left, and Hyunjin is glad to be squeezed in the middle. It’s a tight fit because even wider slides like this aren’t made for three teenage boys. Hyunjin taps the heels of his feet against the shiny metal, the weird rumbling sound loud in the eerie night. It sounds like artificial thunder.  

Hyunjin leans his head on Changbin’s shoulder, feeling him press a kiss on the top of his head. It makes him smile to himself. Neither of the other two comment when he pulls out a pack from the pocket of his jacket, shoving one cigarette between his lips and offering one to Changbin. He only smokes when he is drunk.

Felix is holding his palm on Hyunjin’s thigh. His knuckles look rough even in the dim lighting but he doesn’t ask him about it.

He thinks of how it makes him happy, to have them close like this. Hyunjin is drunker than he expected—when he shuts his eyes, the world around him seems spinning and twirling and twitching even though he is sitting down.

“You guys make me happy,” Hyunjin says after taking a sip from the bottle containing sparkling water, vodka and lemon juice. It’s the only way he can down alcohol and keep it down. God bless the lemons. “Like you know. Not happy-happy. Not to sound depressing but y’all know how I am. But you make me… you make me closest to happy that I manage. I think it makes sense. Does it make sense? You’re like, the only good thing in this godforsaken planet. And pepsi is pretty nice too.”

Changbin and Felix are quiet for a second. Hyunjin waits patiently, looking at the playground and bringing his cigarette to his mouth. The minty taste pushes through the bitterness. Something nauseous twists in his stomach. He doesn’t think about it as he drops the cigarette from between his fingers, and it rolls down the slide. Hyunjin watches as it goes. His fingers are numb.

“It makes sense,” Felix says, smile in his voice.

“Isn’t it gross?” Hyunjin asks, laughing quietly.

“Uh, yeah,” Changbin slides his arm around his waist, tugging him a bit closer. “But you’re gross anyway. It’s cool.”

“Nice,” Hyunjin mumbles. He thinks of kissing him. Of kissing them. It feels right like this.

  
  
  
  


The world doesn’t stop spinning when he’s around them but if the world is still, it gets boring. Maybe that is what’s wrong with him, the constant need for things to turn and twist. The serenity is a lot like the glass surface of a swimming pool when you’re a child. You want to jump in. You want to break it. You want to splash around in the water. It’s not fun just to look at it.

Maybe… maybe. Hyunjin doesn’t really know. Maybe he doesn’t want the world to keep spinning but it’s the only way he knows how to be. Unfamiliar things are scary, people say. It sounds like bullshit but he knows it isn’t.

Hyunjin sits in the swing of the same playground but now he is alone. It’s midday. He’s skipping school on a Wednesday but it’s the best day for it, right in the middle. He takes a sip from the box juice he found in the back of their fridge this morning.

(Sometimes he wishes things weren’t like this. Sometimes he wishes his parents actually cared and that he and the only two people he can call his friends weren’t stupid like this. Stupid because he doesn’t want to admit things like it sober. It feels ridiculous to be a cliché.)

Hyunjin digs his phone out from his pocket before dialing Changbin’s number. He won’t call Felix because he knows he’ll freak out and not answer, before texting back in a passive aggressive manner that why did he call.

“ _Hey,_ ” Changbin’s voice sounds disoriented and odd through the static.

“Hi, can you ditch your class? For me?” Hyunjin smiles to himself as he speaks. He knows what Changbin will answer.

“And go find Felix too,” he adds. Hyunjin sucks the last drops of the apple juice through the straw and crushes the cardboard in his hand. The edges of it press against his palms sharply but it doesn’t hurt.

It doesn’t hurt at all. In fact, it feels satisfying.

 

Hyunjin leaves the crumbled carton by the swing. _Sorry, world. I’ll be better another day,_ he thinks and shoves his hands into his pockets. He has done worse things but at least he's still there. _Thanks, world,_ but it's more a joke than anything else. Evidently, Hyunjin and the universe don't get along but it's fine. Changbin and Felix are stuck on the same boat as him. It'll be fine. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> if this feels unfinished, its on purpose! T___T pls feel free to leave kudos & a comment if u liked this!!


End file.
